The science of bacteria in the atmosphere is getting its moment in the sun.

When I published Life’s Ratchet four years ago, I was focused on how life can create and sustain highly ordered systems in the presence of the surrounding molecular chaos—how molecular ratchets, in other words, “extract order from chaos.” To my surprise, the book generated great interest in the area of aging research. Aging, says Ed […]

In the early 1990s, a few miles west of El Kef, a town in Tunisia, geologists set a small golden spike in between two layers of clay that remains there to this day. They wanted to mark the tiny yet striking layer of iridium—a hard, dense, silvery-white metal—sandwiched in the middle. It was deposited by […]

The director of the Institute for Advanced Study on the wonders of his childhood attic.

A growing portion of the elderly look and act anything but.

Despite the hyperbole, private funding is changing the science of aging for the better.